


Do Not Ask the Price I Paid

by detritius



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eventual Relationships, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Multiple, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-16
Updated: 2015-07-16
Packaged: 2018-04-09 15:16:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4353935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/detritius/pseuds/detritius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will Graham has barely begun to put himself back together after surviving Hannibal Lecter when a new and vicious killer emerges. A take on Red Dragon without the promised three year time jump. Goes AU during "Dolce."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Do Not Ask the Price I Paid

**Author's Note:**

> This is kind of an experiment, so bear with me. It only occurred to me like two weeks ago to do my own take on Red Dragon, but the idea sort of sprung mostly-formed into my head and I realized I wanted to start posting before the show officially went there. So this is sort of a spec-fic, mostly a remix of the characters from the show and some of the structure from the book. I can't say for sure now, but I do plan to continue writing this when the show itself gets into the Red Dragon storyline, and I expect a number of things will be different just because of the compressed timeline. Possibly this is all needlessly derivative and an entirely pointless exercise, but I'm giving it a shot anyway.
> 
> Title is taken from "Lover's Eyes" by Mumford & Sons.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title taken from "Girl With One Eye" by Florence & the Machine.

Freddie Lounds slips on a surgical mask and a pair of secondhand scrubs -- God bless the internet, you can buy anything online -- and waltzes into the ICU like she has every right to be there. Without the need for a telephoto lens, her camera fits neatly into her medical kit. Another illicit purchase, this one good for more than camouflage. She's taken precautions since the night one of her killers cut someone open while she watched and left her pumping his lungs to keep him alive. Never again, she told herself. Some people would've taken that as a sign to hang it up, walk away from crime reporting and start a food blog or something, but not Freddie. No, she just doesn't plan to be helpless the next time someone's bleeding in front of her. She hasn't had to stabilize anybody yet, but knowing she can is comforting.

The room she wants is private, the security around it surprisingly lax. But then, there's no real reason to post a guard, now that all of this is over.

Will Graham is on a ventilator. His chest rises and falls with the rhythmic hiss and release of the machines. His only other sign of life is the subdued but steady blip of his heart monitor. The line showing his brain activity is flat. 

In the harsh florescent light, he looks like a monster from an old black and white horror movie, a creature assembled from discarded parts. His head is bandaged around the temple, his face battered and bruised and sutured with thick black thread. There's another bandage on his shoulder and, when she pulls back the sheet covering him for modesty, an ugly, twisting scar low on his stomach. Surreptitiously, she pulls out her camera and snaps a dozen photos of him full length from different angles, not focusing on his genitals but doing nothing to hide them, either. Tattlecrime has never exactly been safe for work, and if her readers can look at pictures of Columbian neckties, they can stomach the sight of an incidentally naked man.

She covers him up again and, checking over her shoulder, goes in for closeups of his particular injuries, peeling back gauze and tape where she has to. Then, partly out of guilt, mostly because she feels so out of place here, she cleans his wounds and changes his bandages, trying to look efficient and nurse-like. "You wanted everyone to know what he did," she says under her breath. "Now they will." Leaving him as she found him, she makes her escape.

A few hours later, she hits post and in a breath, there's a new headline splashed across her screen:

TATTLE CRIME EXCLUSIVE! SEE THE SCARS OF THE LIVING LECTER VICTIMS!

Behind the cut, picture after picture. Graham in his hospital bed with tubes coming out of him, stock images she found of a bone saw and a linoleum knife paired with shots of his maimed face and abdomen. Alana Bloom leaning on her cane, bent at the waist, lifting her shirt to show all the metal in her back, copies of her original x-rays. Chilton's cratered cheek and useless eye, along with a rather gruesome gif of him removing his dental plate, his face losing structure in its absence. Accounts of just what Hannibal Lecter did to each of them. 

Bloom and Chilton posed for their pictures, though Graham obviously did not. Mason Verger and Miriam Lass declined to comment, and with both under secure and private care, she couldn't insist. She spoke to Verger on the phone and he was most unpleasant, so a note towards the end of the article describes his face, or lack thereof, in needlessly graphic detail, and includes all the unsavory rumors she's heard about the Verger meat business and Mason himself. Lass is only mentioned as the first known survivor of one of Lecter's attacks, captured in the course of investigation and held for two long years. Freddie knows the rest of the story, of course -- she has it from Chilton, who, understandably, tells it with a keen edge of resentment -- but out of respect, she made the unusual decision to leave most of what she's learned unprinted. Trainee Lass has been through enough. Freddie doesn't even know where she is now, but after the incident in interrogation, she suspects the kind of hospital with bars on the windows.

The article ends on a less bleak note, mentioning that Chilton and Bloom are on their feet and working again, Chilton at his hospital and Bloom in the private sector, and Graham is in a coma following his injuries, but in stable condition and expected to make a full recovery. A sort of all's-well-that-ends-well, for the living, at least.

The phrase "expected to make a full recovery" bothers her, but she leaves it in because it's what her readers expect. How can she explain that, from what she hears, Graham's coma is medically induced, after he started to come around and hurt himself clawing at his life support, trying to tear himself free? That something in the room with him terrified him so much that he has to be kept under heavy sedation until he's healed enough for them to safely restrain him? Will Graham's body may recover, but she doubts he'll ever be able to function normally again. She doubts that any of them will. Those of them who survived Hannibal Lecter will spend the rest of their lives jumping at shadows, will likely never have another night of untroubled sleep. Chilton still wakes up screaming sometimes, clutching at his head or his side, and it's been almost a year now since someone hurt him. And what was done to Chilton was callous and calculated and unequivocal, his frequently expressed and vitriolic spite equally uncomplicated. He might never be alright again, but at least he's come to terms. She doesn't think there are even words for all the things that Hannibal Lecter did to Will Graham. The extent of his abuses are still unknown. Before, she might've been heard to speculate that Lecter forced Graham to commit cannibalism, coerced him to murder, or cut him up in a fit of twisted, implicitly erotic obsession. 

Now, she realizes those things are easier to say when you don't really think they're true.


End file.
